


Rest in Peace

by iwillpaintasongforlou



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Future Fic, Harry Has Cancer, Husbands, I can't believe I had to use the MCD archive warning I'm so sad, M/M, and louis' mental state is n o t good, canon-compliant UP UNTIL THE POINT WHERE HE DIES HE'LL NEVER DIE OK, catharsis though, sad louis and dead harry that's a dangerous combination, seriously though proceed with caution this is dark, so just a heads up, stay stong buddies, we're all hurting a bit and a good cry can help, you probably don't want to read this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-19 17:06:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3617595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iwillpaintasongforlou/pseuds/iwillpaintasongforlou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Sometimes, when he looks back on things, there’s a small, angry part of Louis that wishes he’d never met Harry. If he’d just missed that audition, if he’d just stayed in bed, he never would have fallen in love with curly hair and bright green eyes and dimples he’s never gone a day without kissing since. Most times, when he looks back on things, Louis blames himself. The very solar system revolved around Harry and Louis had the closest orbit, flying close enough to feel that warmth in every atom of his body. He should have been paying closer attention, should have opened his eyes and stared into the sun and seen what was happening.</i>
</p><p>Harry has inoperable brain cancer at the age of 26. Louis watches the love of his life slip away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rest in Peace

**Author's Note:**

> "I have a request & it's kinda super sad but I would love you forevermore if you did it & anyway here we go. Harry finds out he has cancer and Louis takes care of him, falling asleep in hospital beds with him, shaving his head for him when his hair starts falling out, helping him around the house when he's too weak. Harry passes away & Louis lies in their bathtub, contemplating what he might have done differently if he'd known how little time they had." ~ ~~some sadistic fuck~~ an anon on tumblr

It was never supposed to end this way.

After everything they’ve been through, it shouldn’t be ending this way. To have found each other as strangers, as wide-eyed, frightened children on the verge of the greatest moment of their life, to fall in love in a public toilet, to find their lives unmistakably and irrevocably intertwined was a miracle. To love each other every day through godawful closeting and virulent hatred and far too many flashbulbs to count was a miracle. After everything they’ve been through, they ought to deserve some sort of a miraculous happily ever after.

Sometimes, when he looks back on things, there’s a small, angry part of Louis that wishes he’d never met Harry. If he’d just missed that audition, if he’d just stayed in bed, he never would have fallen in love with curly hair and bright green eyes and dimples he’s never gone a day without kissing since. Harry would have been famous regardless --Harry has  _ always _ been starlight-- but maybe Louis wouldn’t have fallen so hard if he only ever saw Harry on the other side of a screen. Maybe he wouldn’t have fallen at all if he’d never laid a hand on Harry’s chest and felt his heartbeat quicken.

Most times, when he looks back on things, Louis blames himself. The very solar system revolved around Harry and Louis had the closest orbit, flying close enough to feel that warmth in every atom of his body. He should have been paying closer attention, should have opened his eyes and stared into the sun and seen what was happening.

The headaches could have been anything. Dehydration, sensitivity to the stage lights, overworked senses from the screaming crowds. It could have been anything. It could have been a thousand things that weren’t a cluster of spots on a curious MRI.

“Well,” Harry had said weakly, his palm finding Louis’ as they sat side by side across the desk from Death himself, “I don’t suppose you can tease me now if I forget lyrics.”

There were other doctors of course, Louis made sure of that. There were other MRIs, there were brain scans of every kind and specialists from every continent and so many trips to hospitals that frown lines became a permanent fixture on Harry’s face. “Enough is enough,” he found himself whispering to Louis one night as the love of his life lay curled up next to him in bed, fast asleep. He combed his fingers through hair that Louis had long since ceased caring to cut. “Enough.”

Louis doesn’t say the word cancer until the chemo has really taken hold. Harry is bent over a toilet with tears squeezing from his eyes and blood splattering from his lips because he’s long since lost everything his stomach held, and Louis is kneeling beside him with lips pressed to Harry’s shoulder as he holds back his husband’s hair and tries to pretend it’s all just a terrible dream. The retching stops. Louis reaches out to grab a towel and has to stop for a moment to let his world collapse as his hand comes away with a thick wad of Harry’s hair. “You shouldn’t have cancer,” he whispers to the floor. “It shouldn’t be you.”

It shouldn’t be Harry, who has spent only twenty-six years on this earth and has spent every single one of them improving it just by  _ being. _ It shouldn’t be Harry, who has captured tens of millions of hearts and never broken one. It shouldn’t be Harry, poor, sweet Harry, darling, beautiful Harry who has changed lives and lived his own selflessly and never asked for a thing except to be loved. It shouldn’t be Harry,

It shouldn’t be Harry that has to come to Louis one night with a lump in his throat and a razor in his hand and ask Louis to take the last of his curls. “I look ridiculous,” he says stoically, like Louis is blind enough not to notice how he wipes the back of one hand across his eyes. “Let’s not drag this out,” he adds in words that somehow manage to be heavier than the air that carries them.

Louis has always been the strong one. He was the one who agreed to carry a false relationship for four years of his life, when it was him or Harry. He was the one who held Zayn the night he realized that he had to leave the band in order to save himself. He’s the one who tells Harry’s mother that he won’t live to see the adoption paperwork go through after all. He’s the one who slips his arms beneath Harry’s skin and bones and carries him to the window seat on the days where he wants to see more than the patch of ceiling above their bed and his traitorous legs refuse to take him.

But the problem is that Louis hasn’t always been strong. He was not born with an iron heart, he found it. He found it in a bungalow where five boys were trying to find themselves, where a boy made of stardust was wrapped in Louis’ blanket and telling him things he never knew he needed to hear. He found it in a hand that has always fit perfectly in his own, even when it grew and changed and stardust became a supernova that Louis had always been helpless to avoid, had never even wanted to avoid.

“You know,” Harry said one morning, and paused to let Louis bring a glass of water to his lips and tip it back until his throat was soothed and he sounded less like mortality and more like the boy Louis fell in love with. “You know, I hear Nick is single again. You should give him a ring sometime, lay the groundwork for marriage number two.”

“That’s not funny,” Louis blandly replied. He picked up a fork from the tray he’d brought to Harry and pressed it down into the scrambled eggs he made until they’re barely more than yellow mush. He never scrambles them small enough for Harry to swallow, never makes them even close to right.

“Alright, not Nick then,” Harry assented with a grin that barely touched his tired eyes. “Knew that was a longshot. Better pick carefully, though,  I’m not going to let you replace me with just any old tosser.”

“Harry.”

A bony hand slid across the mattress to come to rest on Louis’ knee. “I’m serious. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Lou, if you’re going to have a do-over I want it to be with someone who deserves you-”

“I said it’s not fucking funny!” The plate went tumbling to the floor, shattered against the wood. Through the sudden, salty haze in Louis’ eyes, the scrambled eggs looked a bit like a broken brain.  _ “You _ are the best, do you understand me? You were my best, you were the one great thing that was ever going to happen to me, and there is no fucking universe in which I could-- in which I could  _ replace--” _

“Louis,” Harry tried, voice contrite, shaky fingers trying to find purchase on Louis’ body to pull him closer when all they could do was beg. “Louis, I’m sorry, I-- I’m sorry. Louis, please.”

It was a long moment before Louis could pull oxygen into his lungs again, could slide his hand beneath Harry’s for the tiny joy of feeling Harry’s ever-weakening grasp on him. Eventually he leaned forward to press his forehead to Harry’s, felt his uneven breaths mingling with Harry’s ragged ones. “I have loved you since I was eighteen, Harry.”  _ I don’t remember how to breathe in a world without you in it. _

If there’s one thing that Louis learns as he watches Harry die, it’s how life can be too short and too long. It can leave you far too soon, before your hair turns grey, before you even know to miss it. It can also drag on, though, when the end is drawing near, when good days go from days spent poolside in exotic places to days where the man whose last name you share can stay coherent long enough to string together the words, ‘I love you.’ Those days can be the longest in a lifetime.

When he can, those are always the words Harry says. He says it over and over again, endlessly, like he’s got a million  _ I love you _ ’s that are built up inside of him and bursting to get out. He says it like he had always planned on spending eternity with Louis and had saved up a foreverful of love he had to hurry to pour out. There aren’t many days towards the end where he can, but those are always the words Harry tries to say.

There isn’t an earthquake, at the end. There isn’t an explosion as the world collapses in on itself, like Louis had always expected there to be. It’s just a quiet afternoon and Harry’s convinced Louis to put him on the window seat so he can watch all the songbirds flocking to the stupid, shitty birdhouse that they built together on their fifth anniversary. It’s just a quiet afternoon where Harry smiles out into the sun, and Louis smiles over at his sun, and the rise and fall of Harry’s chest ends right there as the songbirds sing.

Louis doesn’t say the word dead until two weeks after the funeral, when he’s visiting Harry’s headstone for perhaps the thousandth time and grass is starting to sprout up through the freshly-turned dirt.  _ Harry Tomlinson-Styles, 1994-2020, beloved husband and son.  _ “You’re dead,” Louis tells the dirt. “You’re dead, you sick fuck, and you left me here by myself.”

He isn’t alone, of course, not really, because he has his family and he has his brothers and he has a world that mourns alongside him. An empty house feels like alone, though. A side of the bed with pillows that stop smelling like anything but laundry detergent feels like alone. A room down the hall all done up with brightly-colored animals and silent mobiles and broken promises feels as much like alone as any one man could bear.

The water’s gone cold. It went cold hours ago, if Louis’ honest, but there’s no one here to be honest to. It’s comforting, somehow, to feel the ache start up in his body from too long spent unmoving and curled up between unyielding linoleum walls. That’s what bodies are supposed to do. They’re supposed to live on and feel things, to heal from wounds, to grow and to change and to give new life and to refuse to be conquered.

They’re supposed to live on. They’re supposed to give kisses, more kisses than Louis ever thought to give Harry. They’re meant to reach out and stroke a lover’s cheek, to tell him he’s beautiful, to whisper  _ marry me _ every day even when there’s a place on the left hand where the fourth finger meets the knuckle that promises never to be empty again.

Louis lifts his arm slowly, watching his hand rise from the surface until the gold band around his finger emerges to glisten with the water running down it. Somewhere in a field, six feet beneath new grass, is the other part of the set. Somewhere in a field, six feet beneath new grass, is the other part of Louis.

Strength of heart gives out and Louis lets his hand sink below the surface once more, closing his eyes against the too-bright lights of the room. “Rest in peace,” he tells the emptiness. “If you could just give me one last thing, please just rest in peace.”

**Author's Note:**

> I was honestly going to skip this and hope no one noticed but in order to recover from the Zayn feels I needed some good old-fashioned catharsis, so I figured what better way to make Zayn's leaving sound chipper than to kill off Harry with brain cancer?! worked like a charm I feel loads better


End file.
